“I hear you!”
Cyrus was barking his head off. Pete hoped he could get out of the hole and calm the dog down before his barking summoned everybody in the hollow to the sawmill. He had never been especially interested in sports, but he now wished he’d tried a whole lot harder when Coach made the boys climb that rope in the gym. What was it—right hand, left foot, then left hand, right foot? Or was it right-right? There was a wall of dirt in front of him, so he had something to brace his feet against as he climbed. The hole that had swallowed him reached all the way back to the wells. His hands burned from squeezing and pulling on the rough rope, and he slipped and fell all the way back down the first time he made it to the rim of the hole. It took forever, but he pulled and climbed and sweated and cried till at last his head was in daylight.
A few more heaves brought him facedown on the damp ground, where Dovey started to run to his aid, but he knew it could cave in again. “No! Stay back!” he yelled. She obeyed, but Cyrus didn’t. He sprinted to Pete, licking his neck and sniffing around his head. Mercifully, the sight of his companion made the hound stop barking. Pete didn’t even try to walk for fear of punching another hole in the ground. Cyrus stayed right beside him as he dragged his body along the rope line, all the way to the tree, and finally let go at Dovey’s feet. For a while he just lay there breathing hard and trying to recover from the fright and the disappointment and the whole awfulness of everything. He could feel Dovey sit down beside him as Cyrus kept sniffing all around his head and neck, trying to see his face.
“All that for nothing,” he said, finally sitting up and untying the rope around his waist.
“All what?”
“Me gettin’ this stupid idea and plannin’ this stupid trip and thinkin’ I could do something stupid like rescue somebody that’s already dead.”
“But you wasn’t tryin’ to rescue him,” Dovey said. “You was lookin’ for a way to tell him goodbye. And now you know this ain’t the way. So you’ll just have to keep on lookin’.”
Man, she was something! And she had been right here in this hollow his whole life.
“What time you reckon it is?” he asked.
She looked up at the sun. “Around two. C’mon to the house. I’ll doctor your hands before you go home.” They gathered up their supplies and retraced their path through the woods with Cyrus.
“I’ll bring you a new lantern,” Pete promised as they returned the other supplies to the shed. He and Dovey followed the path back to Hollow Road, where it came out right in front of the house with the flowers. Dovey led Pete to a rocking chair on the porch.
“This is your house?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said with a frown. “Why? What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing’s wrong with it, Dovey. It’s just that I noticed it when me and Cyrus came by on our way to the mill. All the flowers, I mean. They’re real pretty. Like my mother’s.”
She gave him a big smile that made him forget all about his throbbing hands. “Thank you. Granny Paul says flowers are my gift.”
She disappeared into the little house. A few minutes later, she came out with a bowl of water for Cyrus and a boxful of small jars and strips of cloth. Then she brought out a wash pan filled with water and set it on a little table in front of him. Pulling up a chair for herself, she sat down and began carefully washing all the blood and dirt from his hands and arms.
“Holler if I hurt you,” she said.
“No, you’re doin’ fine.”
She dried his wounds with a clean dish towel and then dabbed them with salve from the jars.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“It’s Granny Paul’s healin’ balm,” she said. “It’ll make your cuts quit hurtin’ and close up faster.”
His hands were a real mess, so she took her time getting lots of salve on all the rope burns and then wrapped them in soft strips of cloth from the box.
“There,” she said, examining her work. “All done. Leave the bandages on till morning. Then your mama can doctor you again.”
“Thanks—for everything,” Pete said. “I’d be down in that hole right now if it wasn’t for you.”
“I reckon you would.” Cyrus came and put his head in Dovey’s lap. She scratched him behind the ears. “A dog’ll never forget you if you do that.”
Pete grinned. “Yeah, I know.”
“Well, I guess you better be goin’,” she said.
Pete and Cyrus started down the porch steps. “Hey, Dovey, can I come back sometime—you know, just to visit?”
“You don’t belong here.”
“I know. But can I come anyway?”
“I reckon so—till my daddy runs you off with his shotgun.” She was already in the house, and he couldn’t tell if she was teasing about that last part. He sure hoped so.
Pete looked up at the afternoon sky, which seemed a little bluer now that he had met Dovey. Maybe he hadn’t done what he came to do, but he had done something. He felt different. With a smile and a wave just in case Dovey was watching from inside, he set out for Aunt Babe’s. He and Cyrus would make it home before dark.
Seven
MAY 23, 1964
Paul Pickett stopped dusting the rough-hewn mantel over her fireplace and picked up the only picture she owned of her whole family. She needed help, but which of the women to call on? They were all there, staring back at her from a tarnished frame.
Years ago, a traveling picture man had posed the family together in front of her house. At the center of the clan, seated on two ladder-back chairs, were Paul and her Hinkey. How she missed him! Gathered around them were their four sons—Adam, Noah, John, and Joseph—and daughters Lydia and Selah, along with their spouses and all the grandchildren. Most of the older children in the picture had since grown up and left the hollow for paying jobs in the cotton mills.
Mammon, cursed mammon. Family should come before possessions.
She studied the women. Her two oldest, Lydia and Selah, stood with their husbands on either side of Paul and Hinkey. They didn’t look anything like her. Paul had a small frame, but she was strong and wiry from years of hard work. Her eyes were a very pale blue. As a girl, she was known for her long golden hair, which hung to her waist. Age had turned gold to silver, but she still kept it long. She wore it plaited and pinned into a bun at the nape of her neck. Because she did not believe in women wearing britches, she did all her work, even milking two cows, in a simple shirtdress—cotton in the summertime and wool in the winter.
Both of her daughters were tall and lean like their father, and they had his dark eyes and hair, just like their brothers. All of her children were the spitting image of Hinkey, which was such a comfort now that he was gone.
Just behind Paul and Hinkey in the photograph stood Adam, her oldest boy, and his wife, Delphine—the smartest of her daughters-in-law. Delphine had more schooling than most. Better still, she had plenty of walking-around sense.
Off to the side stood Noah and his sweet wife, Aleene, a trusting soul who always saw the best in people, even when they didn’t deserve it. If anybody should ever try to hurt Aleene, Paul would take up her shotgun and lay them out herself. She was keeping it even handier now—loaded and laid across her bureau at night—what with all the talk about Babe’s grandboy gone missing and his truck found in this very hollow. Trouble to come from it—intruders and meddlers. She would deal with that in due time.
Gently she ran her hand over John and Lottie, looking at each other with such love. They had just married when the picture man came around. Of her four boys, John was the one who melted her heart. He had married an angel. But now Lottie was in heaven with all the other angels. There had been no way to shield Dovey from what that sickness did to her mother. None of Paul’s healing could touch it, and even when John insisted on trying a doctor, the man proved useless. First sign of trouble came in late summer, and Lottie crossed over two days before Christmas.
Since she died, all the women in the family (except
for Ruby, who was useless) had tried to mother Dovey and do for her. But Dovey never asked for much. Since Lottie passed, it was as if she felt she didn’t have the right to, and that’s a heartbreaking thing to see in a child.
Paul traced Lottie’s face with her finger before turning her attention to the couple on the far right of the image, standing at a noticeable distance from the rest of the family. That was Ruby’s doing. Ruby was a loudmouth without a lick of sense who had talked the youngest of the Pickett boys, Joseph, into running off and getting married before anybody could put a stop to it. Paul had made a secret promise to herself that if Ruby should ever drop dead from unforeseen circumstances, she would slip over to the burying ground and dance on her grave.
Sometimes Paul felt a sorrowful longing for the days when her children were first married and the grandchildren were just beginning to come along. The hollow was running over with family back then. But things were different now. Most of the remaining grandchildren were old enough to work and soon would fly. That would leave only Dovey.
Dovey. Paul was reminded of the task at hand. She had a choice to make, and she had chosen Delphine.
Delphine would be her eyes.
Eight
SEPTEMBER 5, 1964
Dovey stood before her mother’s dresser and looked into the tall mirror hanging above it. Her father had made both pieces from a hickory tree he cut down himself, planing the boards till they were smooth as glass and dovetailing all the joints. The mirror tipped out from the wall a little at the top, so you could almost see your whole self. Her mother used to say that every time she looked into that mirror, she remembered how blessed she was.
Her hairbrush was still there on the dresser. Dovey knew the reason why. Her father couldn’t bear to put it away. For him it must’ve brought comfort, a way to feel her mother’s presence in some small way. But for Dovey, the brush was a sorrowful reminder that she would never again feel those gentle hands in her hair.
Before she got sick, Dovey’s mother used to stand her on a footstool in front of the mirror and brush her hair till all the tangles were gone and it fell into smooth, shiny ringlets. So patient and gentle she was that it never hurt, even when Dovey had been on the creek bank with her cousins all day, leaving her hair a tangled mess. After her mother died, Dovey had made the mistake of letting Aunt Ruby try to brush it. She had yanked and pulled so hard that Dovey ran out of the house and hid in the barn to cry.
From then on she kept the tangles out all by herself. She did just about everything by herself except when Pete was with her. The few cousins who were still in the hollow could all drive, and they took off together whenever they could scavenge a pickup from one of the uncles, rarely thinking to include her. It wasn’t that they meant to leave her out. They were just older and tended to forget she was there.
Running her mother’s brush through her hair, she began gathering it into a ponytail. She glanced at the radio on the corner of the dresser. Dovey’s father had bought it for her mother, who loved music, but now he never turned it on except to hear the weather. Dovey kept it on all the time when she was home by herself. She especially liked a lady singer named Patsy Cline whom she had once seen on the Grand Ole Opry on Aunt Ruby’s television. When Dovey heard that Patsy had died in a plane crash, it hit her just as hard as losing a family member.
She loved to hear Patsy sing “Crazy” and “Sweet Dreams” and that song about falling to pieces. But her absolute favorite was “Walkin’ After Midnight” because it was a happy-sounding song about being lonesome, which never failed to lift her spirits. Whenever they played that one on the radio, she would dance through the house, singing at the top of her lungs.
Today, thank goodness, Dovey wouldn’t need the radio to pass the time because it was Saturday, and that meant Pete was out of school and could spend the day with her. Not only that, but they were on a special mission. She straightened her ponytail and set out for Deep Creek Bridge, where Pete would be waiting for her.
Ever since they had found each other back in the spring, Pete and Dovey had spent lots of time together, fishing or wading in the creeks or climbing trees and exploring the woods. Now and then Pete would slip a saddle out of his granddaddy’s barn and ride one of his horses to the hollow so that he and Dovey could explore the creek bank on horseback. Neither of their families knew anything about it.
Dovey looked up at the warm September sun. Everything had been so much easier in the summertime. Without school, Pete was free to do as he pleased once he finished his morning chores, and he usually made it to the hollow by lunchtime. The first time he came back to see her, he had walked right up to her front door and knocked. She nearly had a fit. If the aunts saw—especially Aunt Ruby—they’d tell her daddy, and heaven only knew what he might do. She and Pete couldn’t call each other because nobody in the hollow had a telephone except Aunt Ruby, who couldn’t be trusted with a secret. So whenever they got together, they would settle on a time to meet again. The meeting place was always the same—Deep Creek Bridge.
But then when school started back, everything got harder. It still made her insides hurt to think about that Saturday a couple of weeks ago when she had carried their lunch to the bridge and waited and waited and waited. Pete never showed up. Then Sunday, neither one of them could go anywhere. Sundays were for the Good Lord and family. By Tuesday afternoon, when she still hadn’t heard a word from him, Dovey decided Pete had forgotten all about her. She sat down at her mother’s kitchen table and sobbed till her head hurt. She was still crying when she heard him at the back door.
“Dovey? Are you alright? Can I come in?”
She walked over to the screen door but didn’t open it. “I don’t think you oughta come here no more,” she said.
“Dovey, wait a minute—”
“I told you from the start you didn’t belong here, and you don’t. You make promises you don’t keep, so just go away.”
“Now, you let me in so I can tell you what happened, or I swear I’m gonna sit down on your front porch and explain everything to your daddy when he gets home.”
The door flew open. She sat down with Pete at the kitchen table but kept sniffling and blotting her eyes with a dish towel.
“Are you cryin’ because of me?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. No point in lying about it.
“Well, that ain’t never gonna happen again. Listen, Dovey, I couldn’t help it. Saturday morning Mama got up and said we were goin’ to Birmingham to buy school clothes, and nothin’ I said or did could talk her out of it. And then she wanted to stop and visit my Aunt Geneva on the way home. Then Sunday was Sunday, and Monday they took us on a stupid field trip to the Wheeler Dam and Helen Keller’s house in Tuscumbia, and we didn’t get home till dark, so I couldn’t—”
“Who’s Helen Keller?” Dovey asked, sniffling into her dish towel.
“Huh? Oh, she’s this famous writer from up in north Alabama. Can’t see nor hear, but some teacher figured out how to spell words in her hand so she could understand what people were sayin’.”
“That sure would be lonesome, not bein’ able to hear nor see nobody,” Dovey said.
“I guess. Listen, I think we’re gettin’ off the subject.”
“I reckon I’d rather talk about Helen Keller than remember bein’ forgot. How’d you get here so quick after school let out?”
“One of my cousins was on his way to Childersburg, so I asked him to drop me off at the creek to fish. I bet he’s wonderin’ how come my cane pole’s still in the back of his pickup. Look, we can figure this out, Dovey. For starters, you’ve got to believe that I would never ever just not show up. If I’m not here, there’s a reason for it.”
She looked up at him. “That’s hard to remember when I’m all by myself.”
“I know. We just need some way to signal each other when something comes up.”
“Nothing’s gonna come up for me.”
“Well then, let’s figure something out for me,”
he said. “I got this idea. See, Daddy Ballard had a phone installed at Aunt Babe’s. He pays the bill and everything so she can talk to her kids or call somebody if there’s some sort of emergency. And then she’s got Cyrus, who can track like nobody’s business. Bet we could teach him to track you. If I could call Aunt Babe and she could send Cyrus to you, then you’d know I had a good reason for not comin’. What do you think?”
Dovey shrugged and said, “Worth a try, I guess.”
They had waited to visit Aunt Babe until Dovey’s family was especially busy and distracted with the cotton harvest. Today was the day.
When she reached the bridge, she spotted Pete waiting on the creek bank below. She had heard her older cousins talk about their girlfriends and boyfriends. It wasn’t like that with Pete. Still, it made her happy just to sit beside him. She liked the dimples in his cheeks when he smiled and the way he looked at her as if there wasn’t anything else in the world he would rather be looking at.
Waving to her, he climbed up the bank to meet her. “You ready for Aunt Babe?”
“I guess we’re fixin’ to find out,” she said.
They fell into step on the dirt road. “You still lookin’ for Isaac?” Dovey asked.
“Hattie told me not to,” he said, “but it don’t seem right to quit.”
“What did she say?”
“She said Aunt Babe told her what I did—about me goin’ to the sawmill. And she said I shouldn’t do anything like that again because I might get hurt. She says she’s not disappointed in me—but I’m kinda disappointed in myself.”
“I think you had to be really brave to even try,” Dovey said. “You must love Hattie and Isaac and Aunt Babe a whole lot.”
Pete smiled. “Hattie said something else. She said you can love somebody so much and mourn ’em so much that it’ll run you crazy if you let it. She says I gotta find a way to put it away and carry on, because good people can end up in the wrong place at the wrong time, and terrible things happen to them, things they can’t help and can’t never make right. Hattie says that’s what happened to Isaac, and she’s worried it’ll happen to me too, if I don’t quit lookin’ for him.”
Missing Isaac Page 6